How to Sell your Boss on Blogging

Justifying the need for additional resources to the head cheese at your company can be a struggle. Sure, you may know in the back of your mind that the company needs to be doing X, Y and Z to open up additional leads or sales, but at the end of the day it’s not really your money being put on the line to make those things happen.

So if you believe in creating relevant and interesting content to feed your target persona, you’ve got a challenge ahead of you. You’re going to need extra time, extra resources and most importantly, you’re going to need to spend the boss’s cash to do it – and he’s going to be asking a lot of tough questions that you’re going to need to answer before he invests that coin into something else.

Like a robot that can replace you.

Question #1: What kind of results can we expect?

There’s nothing like having some solid data in your corner to back you up. Although estimations and projections always look great at first glance, they can hardly be considered ‘solid’ data. Luckily for you, here’s a few ‘real’ nuggets you can toss out there that your boss can take to the bank.

• A company that blogs generates on average, 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages for SEO

• 69% of businesses attribute their lead generation success to blogging

• 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog

• Inbound marketing, of which blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing (trade shows, tv/radio commercials, mailers, etc.)

Question #2: How do we Deal with Negative Feedback?

Anything you publish to the internet is subjected to potential negative feedback. In fact, we’ve written an entire article on how you can expect to proceed with such comments. There are going to be negative comments, regardless. What’s important here is that you don’t let that stop you from putting out great content and building your online brand. Just focus on writing killer content and the ‘haters’ out there will genuinely keep to themselves. If your company is confronted head on with any particular backlash, it’s important to be human and show compassion. The last thing this world needs is yet another faceless corporation.

Question #3: How much time will this Eat Up?

Budgeting time for blogging is tough, and you’re going to need to do some detective work. Put on your gumshoe hat and see what your competitors are doing. How often is your organic search competition blogging? In order to leap-frog them in your inbound marketing, out-blogging them is going to be a key part of that.

Once you’ve determined how often you’ll be publishing content, you’ll know how much support you need. You may be able to handle it yourself or maybe the workload can be spread around. You may even decide that a new position may be needed. Just make sure that there’s a good mix of content and that it gets published at regular intervals.

Question #4: Who here knows how to write?

Your writing skills shouldn’t determine whether or not you’re ready to start producing content. Think of it like this. If you’re in sales, you’re able answer any questions about your products and services. Or if you’re  upper level executive, you most certainly know about your industry. Quality content is about the knowledge behind it. You have the knowledge you need to blog.

Good blogs aren’t long, complex, and full industry jargon. They’re the ones that connect with their target persona by being specific and engaging.

Question #5: How will this Affect the Rest of our Web Presence?

One of the keys reasons why a search engine knows to return your website in search results is based on the quality of your content and the frequency at which it is published. Blogging is an easy, low-cost solution to this and it also serves to feed your social media efforts by giving you content to share and have shared. Your blog content will not only help you attract more followers on your social media networks, but those networks will also help you attract more readers. Blogging and social media should stroll the interwebs hand in hand and grow together.

Quality original content should be the absolute basis of your online branding efforts. A website with new content that keeps top of mind is much more likely to see further engagement and overall ROI from its users than the traditional brochure-ware websites that you’ve seen a million times.

As marketers, we put a lot of time into what may seem like very marginal results. We carefully examine things like total website visits, conversion rates, Facebook likes and engagement, blog shares and all of those other cute little marketing buzzwords that usually make El Presidente glaze over like a Cripsy Creme doughnut during the Monday morning meeting. But all of those things are important, and when the time comes to present the impact of your marketing efforts to your boss, you can’t present him or her with everything you measure, so here’s a small glimpse into the mind of a bottom-liner: